


i know what we need

by lilypottersghost



Category: The 100 (TV), The 100 Series - Kass Morgan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Summer Camp, Angst, F/M, Hiking, Hurt/Comfort, Sharing a Bed, both physical and emotional, discontinued, ex-friends to Lovers, ish
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-02-26 09:16:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22413268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilypottersghost/pseuds/lilypottersghost
Summary: “Is that why you’re here?” she asked. “To think?”“Why are you here?” he countered. As soon as he was done saying it, his expression fell back to earth, his frown suddenly deepening with disapproval. Now grave, he met her eyes and asked, “Why would you come here alone, Clarke?”*Clarke and Bellamy went to summer camp together for nearly ten years, but then Clarke's dad died, she stopped going to camp, and they drifted apart. Six years later, they cross paths on the Appalachian Trail.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin
Comments: 34
Kudos: 149





	1. don't look at it

**Author's Note:**

> title from "contaminated" by banks, whose third album was the soundtrack to my summer (and my entire year...)

The Mahoosuc Notch is a rock-filled ravine that one encounters along the ten-mountain Mahoosuc Range, and it’s the most difficult mile on the Appalachian Trail.

And though Clarke Griffin knew this, she felt stupid sitting on her ass, stuck on the ground between two boulders too high for her to climb with her left wrist sprained or broken.

It had been an hour of her frantic breathing, her scattered mind and bruised body trying to assess herself and craft a splint out of whatever she had: a stick that wasn’t sturdy enough but all she’d been able to find, which was tight against her sweatshirt-wrapped arm with the help of an inordinate length of duct tape. It was elevated by her spare t-shirt, which she’d done her best to tie up and around her body like a sling.

Her good set of fingers clenched and unclenched around the phone in her hand. There was no service. Of course, she had known that—and even knew that she wouldn’t call anybody if there was.

For the same reason why she didn’t call out the first few times another hiker passed above her. Once she called someone, once she needed help, it would mean that she couldn’t do this. Everyone would be proven correct that no, she was only a twenty-four-year-old woman and twenty-four-year-old women of her small size did not just hike the A.T. alone with little forethought, nor could they do so in a timely fashion given that they don’t get murdered at some point along the way because of course she would get murdered and of course she would fall from a slippery boulder, try to catch herself on her hand, and land on her leg.

The flesh of her thigh was raked like a red garden, black and blue soil already churning underneath. She didn’t think anything was broken there; the only bone there was her femur and she would have fucking felt that.

But after an hour ticked by, she knew that she would need to swallow her pride or illusion of pride or whatever it was that was keeping her from calling out. She promised herself that the next time she heard boots on the rocks, she would yell for help.

It didn’t happen for another ten or so minutes. _Thump. Thump. Thump._ Pause—(the hiker assessing their next move). _Thump. Thump._

“Help!” Clarke screamed. Her voice sounded deranged to her own ears, but only in the way that her thoughts had been sounding deranged to her mind lately—probably because they were unhinged, fraying against the unrelenting need to emerge out from under grief’s heavy mountain.

The hiker yelled back. “Coming!”

More thumping. More surveying silence, then more thumping. The footfalls halted above her.

“Here,” Clarke called, and soon the hiker stopped.

Clarke looked up to see a face appear in the space between rock and sky.

“In a bit of a pickle?” asked the face.

They weren’t trained to say that. If this woman had any semblance of first aid training, she would have said, _Don’t move your head_, and then, maybe, _I’m here to help you_. And since the woman had no semblance of first aid training, she must not have been a seasoned hiker.

“Yeah,” Clarke said to being in a pickle.

“What happened?” asked the woman. Clarke thought maybe her accent was English. Clarke could only guess the features of her silhouetted face; the sun was high above them, silhouetting the woman above her.

“I fell,” she replied lamely. “My wrist might be broken.”

“Do you want me to get help?” the woman offered.

“That would be great,” Clarke said. “Thank you.”

The woman did not return. No one did, in fact. Clarke’s luck was such that the moment she’d abandoned her pride had happened to be the same moment when the steady stream of hikers would come to a halt.

She was stuck in the Notch. Everyone at Camp Arkadia had called it the “Knot,” most likely due to a collective community slip of the tongue that had taken the form of a fact once enough people had been getting it wrong for a long enough period of time. But Clarke actually liked “Knot” better than “Notch.” A notch is less threatening than this was. Clarke felt tied up, unable to move or speak or escape, like the rocks were an ever-tightening splint around every bone in her body.

After hours passed and the sun began to set, she felt even more trapped. She saw no past or future: only here, in the heart of this knot, this place bound by rocks.

Clarke knew why the hikers had stopped coming. To clear the Notch, you have to do it all in one day. She was in the middle of it, and any hiker who came through after mid to late afternoon wouldn’t make it to a campsite or even a camp-able unofficial site before nightfall. There wouldn’t be anyone else until morning, this she knew.

The understanding that she would be stuck all night folded over her with the darkness.

*

The knot held her tighter in its heart. It was damp and black. Clarke had made a sandwich before the sun had completely set, and she had enough room in her little crevice to relieve herself without marinating in it, but those were the only two things about which she had little to complain.

Nights are _dark_. You forget, living in towns and cities where a light is always on somewhere, whether it be in the hallway or down the street.

There was no light. Not here or in a hallway or down the street. There was only Clarke, the moonless sky above, the rocks, the trees, and the animals. And the only evidence at all she had for their existence was the cold solidness against her back, the wind shuffling through the leaves like a malevolent dealer, and the endless singing of the bugs with the occasional rustle or caw of more sturdy beasts in the distance. Whether her eyes were open or closed made no difference.

She couldn’t easily drift off. Not when mosquitoes were making a home on her body and her wrist was on fire and she could barely think straight, let alone calm down long enough to sleep.

She wanted to be at home, braiding Madi’s hair before bed, because Madi always wanted her hair away from her neck and face when she slept but disliked the harsh pull of hair ties and scrunchies. Clarke would be talking to her, their eyes meeting in the mirror as she asked whether or not Madi had brushed her teeth, and she would inevitably have to check the toothbrush to be sure.

A tear fell, then another. Clarke had been so _dumb_. Only dumb women trick themselves into thinking they’re mothers when they aren’t, or get it in their heads that they’re going to hike the A.T. only to eat shit in the Mahoosuc Notch.

She was so stupid. She didn’t know these mountains like she thought she did. The last time she was here, she’d been no older than fourteen. The last time she was here, it wasn’t she who’d fallen but Bellamy, and at first she had laughed at him. In her defense, he’d slipped and fallen behind her, so she hadn’t seen it but heard his little yelp, then his swearing afterward which soon grew more panicked than anything else.

“Oh.” She was quickly realizing how bad it was, unbuckling her pack and letting it thump to the flat rock beneath her as she crawled down the other side, where he lay, still half sitting up, his knee torn up, blood seeping and dripping down onto the rocky ground. She heard herself yell back for someone to get a leader, but for now she was the only person who could fit in this “V” in the rocks with him.

“Stay still,” she murmured to him—which is exactly what you’re supposed to say but she didn’t know that yet; she just wanted all time to stop and let them be still, let them take a moment because suddenly she was scared—as she unbuckled his pack and took it off of him halfway. He helped her with the other side, leaning against it once they’d gotten it off.

He was probably fine. Probably. But she knew that he had panicky reactions when it came to blood. His face was growing unnaturally pale already, his breathing growing shallow. She unzipped the brain of his pack, searching for the longsleeved nylon she knew he kept in there.

She wadded it in her hand and pressed it hard against his knee, using her other hand on the underside of his leg to keep it steady and provide more pressure.

“Where’s Lincoln?” he was asking. “Anya?”

“They’re coming, they’re coming,” Clarke said, handing him his water bottle even though that wouldn’t do anything for the problem: his blood slowly sneaking through the nylon.

“You’re okay,” she was reassuring awkwardly as she watched his eyes fill with panicked tears, his freckled face flushing. “You’re okay,” she said again, not knowing what else to say because she knew Bellamy better than she knew most of her friends back home, but she still didn’t know him here: in this limbo between hurt and panic and emergency, a space in which you never hope to know someone. But here they were, because he liked to hike behind her so he could sneak up to blow on her ear, and she liked to hike in front of him so that she could “forget” to hold back a branch for him, or so she could pull one back on purpose so that it would whack him in the face (which wasn’t how he’d ended up here, but probably wasn’t entirely safe).

But that was only fun. Now they were here, where they had to meet each other all over again. _Hi Crisis Bellamy, I’m Crisis Clarke._

Now he was looking down at his knee, his eyes growing impossibly wider and cloudy with a frantic, dangerous energy. Rougher than she would have intended if she’d thought about it for longer than a millisecond, she grabbed his chin in her fingers and jerked his head so that he was looking at her.

“Don’t look at it,” she said. “It looks worse than it is.”

“How do you know that?”

“It always looks worse than it is. Like when I cut my ankle shaving last summer and you nearly carried me to the Health Center because you thought I would bleed out. You’re okay.”

“You _were_ bleeding out,” Bellamy protested.

“No, I wasn’t. And I think you’re missing the point.”

“You shouldn’t have shaved anyway—it was just Firelight Dinner—”

“Which is a nice occasion. All of the girls were shaving.”

“Nice enough to risk your life? And—honestly, Clarke—I’m surprised you haven’t jumped off any bridges with that kind of philosophy.”

“That’s because none of my friends jump off bridges. I have good judgment when it comes to picking friends.”

“False,” he said, slowly coming out of his panic. “You picked me and look at where you are now.”

“Oh, we’re not friends. I’m just a nice person.”

He laughed, ducking his head like he always did, and then she saw his eyes catch on his knee again, where blood was beginning to seep between her fingers.

“Oh God,” he groaned.

“Don’t look at it,” Clarke ordered. “Look at me.”

He did. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, in and out again and again, and soon he was mirroring her.

“Better?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

*

She must have fallen asleep at some point; somewhere in the depths of her memory, her brain had given up the fight against exhaustion. But now she was awake, the sun in the sky, her head pounding. Something had woken her suddenly, and here it came again:

“Don’t move your head.”

Her ears gave her the information like a receptionist handing off a note with the words, _Bellamy’s voice_, but her brain crumpled it up and told them to shut the fuck up. Because she didn’t trust her ears—and even less, her memory.

She looked up.

He was Bellamy but old. Bellamy but not eighteen anymore. Bellamy with a beard and curls slicked back. Bellamy with a forehead. And that forehead was creased, and his mouth had known many more frowns, and his brown eyes were darker—not in color but in depth. Like how water is darker because it has no end, just keeps going down and down and—

“Bellamy,” her mouth said, taking the note from the receptionist and telling her brain to shut up, because her eyes had proven his existence here.

Frustration struck his face. “Clarke, oh my God! I said don’t move your head!”

She rolled her eyes. “I don’t have a spinal injury. It’s just my arm. I would have been dead by now if it was anything worse.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Since yesterday.’

“Holy shit. I’m getting you out of there.”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

He took off his pack, or at least that’s what her ears told her he did when his head disappeared for a moment and there was a thud of something heavy but soft hitting a rocky surface.

When he leaned back over the crevice, her eyes confirmed it: his pack had been discarded.

“Can you—kind of—” He was tilting his head, analyzing her placement and the rocks around her. “Can you shove your pack up to me? Kind of—use the rock to roll it up here?”

It somewhat worked. Bellamy was able to reach it, grab it, and haul it up to the rock above.

“Your turn,” he said.

And then, like a crazy person, he slid down into the crevice and landed beside her. “Hi.”

She deadpanned. “How are you gonna get out?”

He shrugged. “I can climb. I don’t have a broken wrist.”

He was close to her, she was realizing as her brain finally caught up to her body—which could feel his breath on her face and feel the warmth where his arm had brushed against her unbroken one—and he seemed to come to the same conclusion at around the same speed.

“Hey,” he said, falling out of Crisis Bellamy for a sacred second.

“Hey,” she said back.

“It’s been a while.”

“Uh-huh,” she agreed. _Six years._

They were both searching each other’s faces. She wondered what he was looking for in her. She wondered what she was looking for in him.

She cleared her throat, snapping out of whatever trance she’d been caught in. “Are you going to get me out now?”

He snapped himself out of it too. “Yeah. We should do that.”

It was a process. He knelt, and she stepped onto his knee so that she could haul herself over the rock with her good arm. But she didn’t have enough momentum, so Bellamy ended up having to push her butt.

“Are you sure?” he kept asking.

“God, Bellamy just shove my ass, already.”

Once she was out of the crevice, she helped Bellamy up with her good arm, bracing herself against a tree trunk behind her.

“I need to make you a better splint.”

Clarke sighed, deep and heavy, sitting on her pack. “Can’t we just get to the nearest campsite first?”

“I don’t want you walking around like that. The whole point of a splint is so that the bone is stable for travel.”

Clarke felt her cheeks flush. “I know that. I have a WFA Cert,” she said, pronouncing it “Wuffa” because he would know what she meant better that way than if she had said the letters or even “Wilderness First Aid”.

Bellamy knelt beside her, untying her sling. “Well, I’m a Wuffer,” he said. _WFR_. Wilderness First Responder.

“So, what, you’re in charge of me now?”

“Technically, yes. I outrank you.”

“What if I’m unwilling to allow you to treat me?” she said, feeling like being difficult.

“That would be monumentally stupid of you, but you can try your best to stop me if you want to be monumentally stupid.”

Clarke rolled her eyes. “I wish I had been instantly destroyed.” _Instantly destroyed_: a term used for a patient who may as well not be one, for there is no chance that they will survive being moved to a hospital or even survive until to the point in time at which such a move would be possible. Still hours of life left in them, but dead on arrival as far as a WFR is concerned.

“Well…” Bellamy began but then stopped, losing his focus in disassembling her ungodly excuse for a splint.

“Well?” Clarke asked once the better part of a minute had passed.

His eyes didn’t wander from their intense focus on her arm. “Well, what?”

“You were going to say something.”

“Oh.” His fingers paused. “I think I was going to say something about being glad that you weren’t instantly destroyed.”

“Oh.” She stared at his hair, which had once been so much curlier.

“I think because I’d forgotten how insufferable you actually are.”

Clarke scoffed.

“Don’t move,” he hissed, gripping her arm through the layers of fabric and sticks and tape.

A silence slid by. She knew that Bellamy preferred it this way. He had never cared for distractions. His focus was his prized possession; he knew what it was like to lose it.

“Why are you a Wuffer?” Clarke heard herself ask.

“I stayed at Arkadia. Led trips.”

Clarke knew that he’d worked there; she’d seen it on Instagram. Though her leaders when she’d been a camper had never mentioned it, she could have guessed that Camp Arkadia would only send teenagers onto the A.T. for weeks at a time under the care of adults who were Wilderness First Responders, so naturally that was why Bellamy was one, but her brain couldn’t get from point A to C like it used to. Lately, she found herself getting stuck at Point B before even getting that far. Even Point B felt like a stretch most of the time.

Her brain preferred Point A’s. It didn’t have to look for them. She knew they were real, were tangible and plausible to others, and not a product of her naïve imagination.

Point A: Madi had lived in Clarke’s house.

Point B: Madi hadn’t had a mother.

Point C: Clarke was Madi’s mother.

But there was a boulder over which her brain had skimmed, one that was theoretically easy to get around in her mental map of everything but was impossible to avoid once she was in the middle of the ravine and Madi’s social worker was knocking on their door and Madi was not her daughter, and how could Clarke ever have let herself fall into believing such an impossible thing, that she could get to Point C when Point C had never existed or had a chance of ever existing?

“You think more than you used to,” Bellamy said, and, if he’d been any meaner to her, it would have been code for, _You’re less stable than you used to be_.

“I have a lot to think about,” she said, because she didn’t have the energy to fight him after once again falling into the crevice in her mind between Points B and C, once again chewing on that sharp bone: she had never been Madi’s mother.

Bellamy grimaced. “You and me both.”

“Is that why you’re here?” she asked, yet again not trusting herself for anything. “To think?”

“Why are you here?” he countered. As soon as he was done saying it, his expression fell back to earth, his frown suddenly deepening with disapproval. Now grave, he met her eyes and asked, “Why would you come here alone, Clarke?”

She raised her chin. “You don’t think I could handle it?”

“Fine. Why did you come here like _this_?”

“Like what?”

“I’ve only been with you a half-hour and I can tell something isn’t right. What happened, Clarke? You aren’t yourself.”

That made her blood run cold. And she was back there, knee-deep in the rotting flesh that was their friendship. “The self you know is eighteen, Bellamy. You don’t know me well enough to say something like that.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“No,” she growled, darting her eyes up to his. “You don’t. Even if you know what’s happened since then—you know that my dad died the year before my last summer at camp, that Wells was killed last year, but you don’t know—you don’t—” her voice stopped dead in her throat.

“Clarke?”

“I—You—”

“Breathe. Don’t look at it. Just breathe.”

So what, if who got hurt or who birthed whom or who went to prison or who took in the daughter? So _what?_ None of it meant anything because mothers who had been legally deemed unfit were under review because they were behaving in prison and up for parole soon and possible release, but, _Don’t look at that_, she’d tell herself.

Madi had already started calling Clarke “Mom.” They were _at_ Point C. But there was her first mother, out of prison, and according to social workers and judges and everyone else who didn’t love Madi, Clarke was single, had an unreliable source of income as an artist, and was on an antidepressant. A convicted felon with a biological claim looked good compared to Clarke: just a directionless woman without a family who desperately wanted one, whose own biological mother had been swimming in pills, prisons, and rehabilitation centers for years.

Bellamy was looking at her in a way that let her know he wasn’t going to wait for an answer to his question, _What happened, Clarke?_ but was searching for his own. Because he was Bellamy, and Bellamy could read books and he could read people and he could read people as though they were books, and he’d already read her cover to cover.

She hadn’t been planning on giving him the satisfaction of actually answering his question, _Why are you here alone, like this? _but now, looking into his eyes, which seemed just as scraped raw and open as her heart felt, and were like this even in their state of searching, and were so brown and deep and _Bellamy_ and right in front of her, Clarke shook her head. So what if she’d wanted to challenge him? Now, she could only utter the truth, tears biting at the surfaces of her eyes because _Point C does not exist_.

“Nothing means anything anymore.”

Looking into her eyes, hearing her minimal words and reading all the rest she had not said, Bellamy seemed to find his answer.

“I know,” he said with a sincerity that made her wonder what he was running from.

And then, touching her chin, “Don’t look at it. Look at me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> comments fuel my soul
> 
> here's [my tumblr](https://mermaeids.tumblr.com) and [my twitter](https://twitter.com/mermaeids) \- come hang!


	2. lie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> clarke and bellamy meet up with an old friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> disclaimer: while i am familiar with the northern portion of the AT, i have only hiked parts so i'm not entirely sure if the timing or locations match up so PLS FORGIVE ME. also while i've changed a few details camp arkadia is essentially the camp i went to / work at but i changed the location, and i miss camp / don't know when/if it'll happen this year due to the pandemic so i hope you have the patience for a bunch of camper!bellarke flashbacks :). there's a huge backstory here that's unfolding and i'm excited for where this fic is going!
> 
> also! despite both of my parents being adopted i do not have a lot of knowledge about the current rules/processes for foster care and adoption. basically i am not an expert on anything keep that in mind
> 
> (this whole fic is not beta'd)

Luckily, Bellamy had a friend in Maine he could call, a friend who was willing to drive an hour to meet them on a dirt road just off-trail and drive them to the nearest urgent care so Clarke could get her arm looked at.

“What are you doing,” Clarke said when Bellamy got out his phone once they had gotten far enough out of the notch to get service.

“Calling a friend. We’re getting you to a hospital or something,” he said, and she protested—because it was nice to run into him but he didn’t have to take care of her and now she was going to feel like such a burden and how dare he make her feel like a burden—but by then it was already ringing and Bellamy was walking away from her to make the call.

And then they got to the road and Monty was waiting in a beat-up Jeep. Upon seeing Clarke, he jumped out of the car and Clarke run up to greet him with a bear hug.

“Clarke Griffin!” Monty exclaimed, picking her up and spinning her around.

“Careful,” Bellamy warned from behind her, but she could hear the smile between his words. “She’s broken.”

“Bellamy!” Clarke yelled, pulling away from Monty, who was grinning. “You didn’t tell me your ‘friend in Hanover’ was _Monty_!”

“Surprise! I was totally in on it,” Monty said, hugging Bellamy.

Clarke watched as Monty pulled back and studied Bellamy’s face with care, almost concern.

“How are you doing?” Monty asked. “You know, since—”

“Fine,” Bellamy said shortly, stepping away.

Clarke’s curiosity ignited with a bit of shame. Why had she just assumed that she was the only one who could have been on trail for a devastating reason? What had happened to make Monty so concerned for Bellamy’s wellbeing? She filed the information away for later.

Not pushing Bellamy further on the matter, he opened the passenger door for Clarke.

“What the hell, Monty?” exclaimed Bellamy, a smirk on his face. “After all we’ve been through?” Though he was already getting in the back.

Monty shrugged not-very-apologetically. “Princess gets shotgun, Bellamy. Deal with it.”

Monty started the car and they were soon turning around and driving down the dirt road. “So Clarke, what have you been up to the past—what has it been—six years?”

“Oh, you know, tried college, dropped out. I worked as a tattoo artist for a while, selling artwork online on the side. What about you?” Clarke said, hitting the ball back into Monty’s court before the conversation could dwell on her life or anything relating to the gaping hole in her heart.

Monty shrugged. “I’m substitute teaching right now. Part of me wants to quit and work at camp year-round like I did right after I graduated, but I have to at least try real life. At least you’ve gotten used to having a real job.”

Clarke smiled. “Are you implying that camp isn’t a real job?”

“Camp isn’t real,” Bellamy chimed in. “Everyone knows this.”

Clarke didn’t know if she agreed or not. The most real anything had ever felt was when she’d been alone on trail for the past month, but now everything was swirling around her again. Camp Arkadia was a folder of distant, compartmentalized memories. Trying to access them was like looking at a photo underwater. Distorted, murky. But still more real than anything that had happened in her life the past six years: her mother’s addiction that followed her father’s death, dropping out of college, Wells being killed, becoming a foster parent, nearly adopting Madi, losing Madi.

But then she glanced toward the back seat and met Bellamy’s eyes, and the plug was pulled; the drain sucked the water away and they were there again, under the great pine trees in the shadow of the mountains, in the little Maine valley that they’d called their home during the summers of their youth.

They had to be around Madi’s age in this memory, running back and forth along a line drawn with bright red cones in the grass. Trees leaned over them like a ceiling, as they dotted the meadow, which made chasing after one another in this game of capture-the-flag particularly challenging. Clarke was used to her territory being on the soccer field up the hill, which was much easier to defend. And she was always a defender.

Bellamy was offense, always to bother her.

He had blue paint smeared across his cheeks, and handprints down his legs, undoubtedly put there by Murphy or Raven. Clarke herself had drawn elaborate red flames down both hers and Monty's legs, reminding everyone of their team’s mascot this summer.

“You don’t stand a chance, princess,” Bellamy taunted, toeing the line while Clarke resisted the urge to reach out to tag him. He wouldn’t make for the flag until he had tortured her for long enough.

“I’m a dragon now, mermaid,” Clarke bit back, smiling at his scowl. Dragons and Mermaids were two of six total teams because Capture-the-Flag with only two teams is for cowards and people who don’t know that it can be played with six.

Bellamy was throwing his hands up. “I didn’t pick the mascot!”

“Doesn’t make you any less of a mermaid.”

“Mer_man_.”

“Fish boy.”

Bellamy made a run for it, and Clarke went after him. Her heart hammered in her ears, her hand reaching out in front of her to tag him and send him to jail. He evaded her touch, but she managed to chase him into the safe zone, on the other side of the red team’s boundary.

“Nice try!” she exclaimed as the bell up the hill gave three loud rings.

A radio crackled to life on the nearest staff member’s hip. “Blue team has captured red!”

Clarke gasped, whipping around to see their flag noticeably gone from its place, Murphy running off with it across the safe zone toward the soccer field.

“You were distracting me!” she yelled, lunging for Bellamy.

He laughed, running back toward his territory. “See ya, princess!”

“You’ll pay for this, Bellamy!”

He did end up paying for it when Clarke and Monty decided to venture into the safe zone to search for the golden flag: the ultimate prize worth more points than three flags combined. Dragons won as soon as Clarke spotted it under the porch of the Main House.

The following year, when they were thirteen, they were placed on the same team: the Sky People. Their rivalry persisted until the final day of the Tournament, when their leaders had pulled them aside and told them to get over it. What their leaders didn’t see was that they truly _were_ friends—that was the year Bellamy dragged her to the infirmary after she cut herself shaving—but the Tournament got them so fired up that all semblances of friendship seemed to pale in comparison to their competitive spirits. Competition was always aflame between them, even the following year when they were placed in the same co-ed cabin, the year of Bellamy’s fall. She was always trying to bike faster than him, climb higher than him. Until their third trip, when Lincoln and Anya had placed them in the same canoe.

“See?” Bellamy had said pointedly at the end of the day, washing dishes in the stream with Clarke and Anya. “Clarke and I can work together.”

Anya had to agree since they had been the most efficient canoe that day.

In the car, Clarke smiled, kind of thankful that she had come across Bellamy on trail as she listened to him and Monty bicker over the aux cord. These people had been her team before everything in her life had gone to shit, and maybe they could be her team again.

But the happy thoughts were always fleeting. What soon followed was darker, meaner. The lingering storm in the back of her brain laughed at her, scolding her for getting her hopes up. It had been six years, and Monty and Bellamy, along with the rest of their friends, had continued working at Camp Arkadia without her. They were a new, different team, and even though they were making her feel like one of them now, she never would be again.

Too much had happened, both to her and to them. She may feel at peace right now, but after this car ride, after their trip to urgent care, she and Bellamy would eventually start hiking, her potentially later than him depending on how bad her wrist was, but either way they wouldn't hike together, and their paths wouldn’t cross again.

_Don’t be stupid, Clarke_, the storm scolded.

_You aren’t allowed to have people. You aren’t on a team._

*

All Clarke wanted to do was stare silently out the window, but Monty started telling stories about his and Bellamy’s time on staff at Camp Arkadia, and Clarke had to listen politely. She laughed at all the right times, though once for real when Monty told a particularly great story about when Bellamy took a very heavy copy of _the Odyssey_ on trail the year he and Monty led the high school seniors on the last 120 miles of the A.T.

“I wanted to read it to them before bed,” Bellamy said, defensive.

“Which they went along with for about the first two nights,” Monty said, “after which all they wanted to do was play Mafia until they passed out.”

Other than that, she mostly tried to tune them out. She hated this: playing catch-up. It was just a reminder of all she had missed as well as the shitty six years she’d spent on her own.

A few times, Bellamy seemed to notice her unease and throw an apologetic look her way, until eventually he spoke up.

“Hey, Monty,” he said gently. “I’m pretty tired. Do you mind turning the music down so I can try to sleep?”

“Oh, of course,” Monty said, doing so.

Clarke threw an appreciative look at Bellamy and he gave her a sympathetic, tight-lipped smile.

There was a time in Clarke’s life when she would have fixated on that smile for days, recalling it whenever she needed to smile herself. Bellamy used to be her fuel, even during the school years when they were apart. In high school, they were always texting both individually and in their cabin’s group chat, and even calling each other some nights when Bellamy needed help on a math problem or Clarke needed him to read over one of her essays, or if they just missed camp more than usual.

“I’m different here,” Bellamy had admitted to her one night. Their families were sleeping, so they were whispering over facetime.

Clarke frowned. “I know what you mean. I’m different here, too.”

“I don’t know if you’d want to be my friend if you went to my school.”

Clarke chuckled at that. “You _definitely_ wouldn’t want to be my friend if you went to my school.” People didn’t like her; they assumed she was stuck up because of her parents’ money and political power. And Bellamy was directly the opposite, his mother barely getting by.

“I guess it’s a good thing we met at camp,” Bellamy said, and Clarke could tell he was getting tired because that’s when he got sappy.

“Yeah,” she said, agreeing anyway. “I guess it is.”

*

Clarke stared at the wall, around the room, wondering how just this morning she was stuck in a ditch on the AT and now she was here, about to share a bed with her old camp best friend slash crush.

They had walked in, and Monty had offered to take the couch and let them have his bed.

“Oh no, we weren’t—” _hiking together_, Clarke was going to say, but Bellamy had interrupted her.

“That’s great, thanks,” he’d said, and Clarke had whisper-yelled at him the second the bedroom door had closed behind them and he started setting up his sleeping bag on the floor.

She wasn’t about to let Bellamy make her feel guilty about this, nor was she up for dealing with his chivalry.

So they were sharing the bed. This was fine.

She sat on her side of the bed and stared out the window, through the leaves of the marijuana plants Monty had on the window sill. Even though May nights in Maine were still on the chilly side, Bellamy had left it open a crack. They were both used to the cold at this point, anyway.

Hanover hardly even counted as a civilization to Clarke, who had grown up in Washington D.C., so while the streetlights outside Monty’s bedroom window were a comfort compared to trail, it was dead quiet. Maybe too quiet. What was nighttime without the bugs, the birds, the rustling of the trees overhead?

All she had was Bellamy’s rustling around the room, getting ready for bed. They’d left their packs in the kitchen to air out since they were both pretty gross-smelling at this point.

At least she and Bellamy now smelled like old-spice and detergent, having taken advantage of Monty’s shower and washer/dryer.

Clarke struggled to re-wrap her wrist since she’d taken off the brace to shower. After taking an x-ray and making sure that her wrist hadn’t broken, the doctor at the urgent care had assured her that it was just a bad sprain and that she could keep hiking after icing it for 48 hours and keeping it elevated. But Clarke had told Bellamy that it was 24 hours because she wanted to get this over with and get back on trail sooner rather than later.

“Here, let me help.” Bellamy’s hands came into view bumping into her own as he took over, kneeling in front of her as he wrapped it the way the doctor had before, furrowing his eyebrows in careful concentration.

It occurred to her that she didn’t know what he did for a living. He could be an actual doctor and she wouldn’t even know.

“What do you even do for a living?” she said, trying to sound casual even though her insides were lamenting the fact that this person used to be her best friend and now she doesn’t even know the most basic information about his life.

“I’m a middle school history teacher,” he said, taping the wrap in place.

Clarke felt her face break into a grin.

“I can see you doing that.”

Bellamy grimaced. “Well, it’s kind of only in theory right now. I, uh—quit in March.”

There was something there, behind his eyes, that made dread bubble in her stomach. What else had she missed? What didn’t she know? And why did she feel like she couldn't ask?

Bellamy didn’t actually care about her. He didn’t trust her. He’d come across her in a hopeless situation and fulfilled his chivalrous Bellamy duties by helping her out. That was all this was. She didn’t have the right to know his life events anymore.

If he let her in, she would ruin his life like she’d ruined her own, like she’d ruined Madi’s.

They had turned off the light, lying as far from each other as the queen bed would allow, and Clarke was trying not to cry.

The day the social worker had come to take her back to her biological mother, Madi had clung to Clarke’s side. She hadn’t wanted to go, had buried her face in Clarke’s oil paint-stained t-shirt and cried, begging Clarke not to let the social worker take her.

Clarke rolled over to stare out the window again, taking a deep, steadying breath. She couldn’t afford a therapist, especially after she started falling behind on commissions once Madi was gone, but she was pretty sure that that’s what a therapist would tell her to do. Take a deep breath. Focus on something else.

Tell yourself it wasn't your fault.

Except it was. Clarke wasn’t good enough, didn’t make enough money to give Madi whatever she wanted, couldn’t be a good enough mother.

After, Clarke had called Madi every day. Most of the time, she'd answered. Clarke even visited a few times to drop off some stuff Madi had left at her house, but then that had all been cut off when Madi’s mother filed a restraining order within a month.

Clarke hadn’t spoken to Madi in six months by the time she stepped foot on the AT in mid-April. After months and months of waiting for her pain and sense of failure to fade, she’d decided that she needed to do something drastic. And the AT, her final summer as a camper, had been her last good year before everything had gone to shit. When she thought about the last time she had truly been herself, it was that summer that came to mind, at that three-week trip on the last 120 miles of the AT with eight other seventeen-year-olds, including Bellamy and Monty. She cherished those memories, that weightless version of herself. Because the following March, her dad died, and it was her mother’s fault. Abby was addicted to her pain medications from after the accident by the time Clarke left to work at camp that summer, and when she had returned in August, it was to her mother passed out on the bathroom floor. Clarke had had to move into her first year of college all by herself, getting calls every evening from rehab.

“You okay?” Bellamy asked.

Clarke swallowed, not turning to face him as she said, “Fine. You?”

“Fine.”

_Neither of us answered that question_, Clarke thought to herself.

“You know I’m hiking with you after this, right?”

Startled, Clarke rolled over and found herself much closer to him than she’d estimated. “No,” she said. “You’re not.”

He met her eyes, and this was him digging his heels in the dirt, being as stubborn as ever when it came to her. “Yes, I am.”

“You don’t need to do that.”

“I do. There’s bouldering and you have a broken wrist.”

“It’s sprained.”

“I don’t care.”

“I _do_.”

Bellamy frowned. “Clarke, even if you need to be alone, we’re gonna be on the same schedule anyway. Even if we stagger, all it would take is one rest day and we’d meet up again. We might as well keep an eye on each other, you know?” He was pleading with her in a way she hadn’t seen in a long time, and for a second she wondered if this was him asking her not to let him be alone.

She really did want to be alone. But if he needed her…

_No, that’s stupid_. Bellamy didn’t need her. He was strong. There wasn’t a world in which Clarke was a needed thing.

But he was still asking her.

“Fine,” Clarke said. “We’ll go together for a few days while my wrist heals. Then we’ll split up.”

Bellamy smiled, a little smug because he’d half-won the argument. “Okay.”

They lapsed into silence, staring at the wall or the ceiling or out the window, anywhere but at each other.

“Bellamy?” she said in a small voice, counting the leaves on Monty’s plants. “Why did you quit teaching?”

A car rolled past on the road below. A breeze reached through the window to stroke Clarke’s face.

“I’m writing a novel,” Bellamy responded.

If she could have trusted herself, she would have latched onto the forced levity of his voice, would have pressed him further.

His voice crawled across the bed and up her back like a spider intent on catching her in a lie. “Why are you here, Clarke?”

A tear rolled down her cheek. “Needed to get away.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> remember to leave a kudo/comment if you'd like! thanks for reading!!
> 
> here's [my tumblr](https://mermaeids.tumblr.com) and [my twitter](https://twitter.com/mermaeids) \- come hang!


	3. shelter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> clarke and bellamy begin hiking together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey everyone! how's quarantine? this chapter is long because i got sucked into pretending i was on trail instead of stuck in my house doing online classes and hating every minute of it. happy reading!!
> 
> (and [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5odqGUf0EelfGeXdHGSR3W?si=sBnphN7QR2SrpSAqS7-0kg) is a playlist that i made for this story if you want to check it out! i listen to it while i'm writing.)
> 
> also if you're on tumblr let me know somehow (either my ask @discovering or leave your URL in the comments) if you want to be tagged when i post future chapters!

Clarke woke in the dead of night to the covers being ripped from her shoulders, the bed creaking as Bellamy sat up in bed, his breaths coming in short gasps.

She was immediately awake, having been a light sleeper since Madi had lived with her. She reached out to grab his arm. He moved away from her touch as soon as her fingertip had grazed his skin.

“Bellamy? What’s wrong?”

“Go back to sleep, Clarke,” he said through clenched teeth.

“Are you okay?”

“Just go back to sleep.”

Annoyance flaring in heat across her cheeks, she sat up beside him. “No.”

Bellamy buried his face in his hands, his breathing already slowing down. “It was just a weird dream, all right?”

Clarke looked at him. He was just a vague figure in the half-light from the window. “Do you want to talk about it?”

He sighed, finally meeting her eyes. “I don’t know if we can talk about things anymore, Clarke.”

That hurt more than she would ever admit. But she knew what he meant. They’d been lying to each other since Bellamy found her.

She took a deep, steadying breath. “We can try.”

He sniffed. “Can’t we just go back to sleep?”

She smiled sadly. “We can.”

They both lied back down, staring at the ceiling. Monty had those glow-in-the-dark sticky stars on it. He’d taken the time to arrange them to look like the real night sky, constellations and everything.

Clarke closed her eyes, listening to Bellamy’s still shallow breathing.

Giving up, she opened her eyes again, not ready to leave him alone yet. “Remember on trail, when we were kids, and everyone wanted to be in your tent group because you told the best stories at night?”

Bellamy chuckled softly. She counted it as a win. “Yeah,” he said softly.

There were a few moments filled by just their breathing and then, “Remember when no one wanted to be in your tent group because you tossed and turned all night?”

She swatted his shoulder. “I can never sleep on trail; you know that.”

“I hope you’ve gotten better at it.”

She nodded. “Most nights are fine. But I’m kind of nervous about sleeping on trail again after the night I had in the notch.”

To her surprise, Bellamy rolled over to face her. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”

Clarke mirrored him, lying on her shoulder to look at him. “You know I’m just nervous about the bears.”

Bellamy rolled his eyes. “I don’t understand your obsession with the bears, Clarke, they hardly ever hurt people.”

“You haven’t had one charge at you.”

“You were _in the cabin_.”

“With only a screen door between me and a _bear_, Bellamy.”

“It was still a cub.”

“A _big_ cub.”

They both laughed a little. Clarke looked to the ceiling again, because suddenly it was hard to look at him again. She had this ache—and it was always there, though worse now, like skirting the edge of an earthquake and then suddenly finding herself in the epicenter, lying here with Bellamy. She ached for her childhood, for Camp Arkadia. The summers they were campers, before her dad had died, before everything had gone to shit.

“I want to go back,” she said to the stars on the ceiling, her voice suddenly strained.

Bellamy’s hand rested on her shoulder. “You _can_ go back, Clarke. Lincoln is director now—he’d hire you in a heartbeat.”

“Lincoln is director?” she said, having fun imagining it.

“Yeah, and actually Octavia lives on camp too, they're—uh, kind of together.”

She smiled. “That's great. I think. Do you think it's great?”

“You can imagine that I thought he was too old for her at first, but they're good together,” he said. Then, he pivoted back to the thing she was trying to avoid talking about: “Why couldn't you go back?”

“I just can't,” she said, her throat closing. “Too much has happened. I’m not the same person anymore.”

“Yes, you are,” he said like he was pleading with her, his fingers tightening on her shoulder. “You’re still Clarke.”

She thought about it. Bellamy, after all this time, still felt like Bellamy. Maybe he still saw her the way he always had; maybe she really hadn’t become this broken thing after the six years she’d had, after all the things that she’d done and that had been done to her.

She had a sudden need to know. To know him again. To unravel his armor and witness the stuff of his nightmares. She wanted to be the one that he ran to like she’d been when they were kids like she hadn’t been for six long years.

She swallowed her tears before they could fall, facing him again. “What did you dream about?” she whispered.

He sighed. “I was engaged. Last year.” He cleared his throat. “To Echo.”

Her eyes widened on their own accord. “Echo? The Echo I knew?”

He nodded. “She got better, Clarke, she really did. Once we were both on staff, she mellowed out and—she made amends, you know?”

She frowned. “I don’t know if I can picture it.”

Echo had been _terrible_. Spreading rumors about Clarke and her friends, about _Octavia_, who had been two years younger than them. The bullying had gotten so bad that Octavia never returned to camp after her first two summers, and Bellamy never forgave Echo. He never even had to try to make nice with her when they’d been campers because she was always in a different cabin. And the year Clarke was on staff, Echo had taken the summer off because she was doing a gap year in Colorado.

Clarke steered her thoughts back to what was relevant: they had been engaged, Bellamy and Echo, and now they weren’t.

“What happened?” she asked gently.

Bellamy ran an anxious hand down his face. “She cheated on me in December.”

Her heart dropped. “Bellamy, I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’m glad she didn’t wait until after we got married,” he said nonchalantly. “I just still… I don’t know. I had a dream that she left me at the altar, and everyone was laughing. I still feel like a fool, Clarke. Like everyone is laughing at me.”

She shook her head vehemently. “You’re not a fool. You’re just someone who fell in love with someone who didn’t deserve them. It happens to the best of us.”

He gave a rueful laugh. “I’m definitely not the best of us.”

“You are.”

“No,” he said, suddenly serious. “I’m not.”

“It doesn’t matter what you think,” she responded, just as serious. “Because I know you, and I say that you are.”

She could tell that he wanted to fight her on it, but he gave up and smiled again. “Okay, princess.”

Clarke giggled. “Damn straight.”

Suddenly, he was looking at her differently. His eyes seemed to catch the light from the lamppost outside the window.

“What?” she murmured.

“I haven’t heard you laugh like that in years.”

She shrugged, embarrassed. “And you haven’t called me ‘princess’ in years.”

“Well, get used to it, princess.” He shifted the pillow underneath him, closing his eyes and breathing out.

She mirrored him, and just like that, it was decided between them to go back to sleep.

“Goodnight, Bellamy.”

“Goodnight, Clarke.”

*

Monty’s Jeep sucked her into the ukelele music playing through the radio, the rose petal sunrise out the window, the inviting scent of their morning coffee, and spat her back out at the mouth of the same trail from yesterday, Bellamy by her side, both of them decidedly silent.

It had rained overnight; a thin layer of mud formed on the bottom of her hiking boots as they walked off of the road and stepped onto the trail. The still-crisp morning air smelled sweet. Mornings and nights in Maine were cold well into the summer, so Clarke hadn’t worn her shorts at all yet and was beginning to feel silly for having packed a pair. Instead, she wore hiking pants and a thin but warm black shirt. The sun reached its fingers through the dark green canopy, catching the lighter tones of brown and gold in Bellamy’s eyes, but Clarke was trying not to notice that.

He had a map up on his phone. “So we should make it to the campsite on the other end of the notch by this afternoon. We’ll just take a right in a bit to go around it—”

“Around?” Clarke interrupted. “I thought we were going through it.”

He actually had the nerve to laugh at her. She almost flinched but stopped herself. Like everyone else, Bellamy thought she was dumb. Incompetent. Incapable.

“Clarke, your wrist. It’s just easier if we—”

“I don’t want easier. I want to _do_ the damn thing.”

He sighed, clearly frustrated with her.

Surprised with herself, she felt tears gathering in her eyes. Desperate for Bellamy not to see them, she began walking ahead of him, assuming their same position as always, like two birds flying along a migration path that should be long forgotten to them.

“Clarke, wait—we need to talk about this.”

“No, we don’t,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. “We’ll just go around it.”

“Wait. Are you okay?”

He jogged to catch up with her, gently grabbing her arm to get her to face him.

“Clarke—” it killed her how soft his voice could get when he pitied her— “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for it to come out that way.”

She hated pity, especially from him. “Let’s just go, all right?”

They hiked in silence for about an hour as Clarke shook herself out of it, wondering what had come over her. It had been happening for months, the slow unraveling of her composure. She had weaknesses she didn’t even know about, and all it would take was a misplaced phone or a dropped plate in the kitchen of her apartment and she would crumble to the floor, staying there in a ball for hours over the smallest issue that would have made the old Clarke, the Clarke that Bellamy knew, simply shrug and move on.

And soon, if they didn’t go their separate ways, Bellamy would learn that all it took would be a slight change in voice, one nonchalant comment, and she would spiral. His mind would erase the strong Clarke he knew and write down the new Clarke’s breaking points, a catalog of her weaknesses, a map of how to tiptoe around them.

The trail had been becoming steadily steeper and rockier as they made their way up into the mountain range. When she had first started on her thru-hike, she would have become winded at this point of elevation, but after a few weeks, her body had more than adjusted. But her pack was heavier than it had been in a while; she and Bellamy had made a run to the nearest Hannaford the night before to re-stock on food. While walking through the aisles, they had reminisced about re-supply on their trip when they’d been seventeen. Halfway through, a van from camp had met them on trail with more food and letters from camp, brightening everyone’s mood as they prepared for the last leg of their trip. “The best day for the food,” Bellamy had said, placing a can of beans into the cart, “but the worst for the pack.”

Clarke smiled. As they hiked, there were moments when she forgot about everything else, and for fleeting seconds at a time, they were seventeen again and nothing bad had happened. They were just Clarke and Bellamy in the woods again.

She had stopped to briefly adjust the chest strap of her pack when she felt a hand on the back of her neck. Startled, she whirled her head around. “What—”

Bellamy was smiling at her, holding up a brown speck between his thumb and his forefinger for her to see. “Tick.”

Clarke laughed, relieved. “Thanks.”

He flicked the tick into the woods just off trail.

“I’ll check you later, too,” she said, turning around to continue hiking (and hide her warm cheeks) when she realized the implications of what she’d just said. “That is, if they’re still obsessed with you.” Monty and the others used to call him a Tick Magnet.

“Oh, yeah,” Bellamy said, following her. “I’m very popular with them. I’d say I get about two a day. Found one in my hair last week. He was all blown up. Must have been there for a while.”

“That’s so gross.”

“What? I thought it was a bug bite that whole time! Until that day I was scratching it and my finger went under it.”

“Ew, Bellamy!” she exclaimed.

He laughed. “Come on. No way that hasn’t happened to you.”

“As a matter of fact, it hasn’t.”

“Well, not all of us are perfect, princess.”

_Princess_. That was the second time he'd called her that since he'd found her.

She remembered the last time she’d seen him, six years ago. It had been the final day of Clarke’s first and last summer on staff, and they were walking to the parking lot together. They had been one of the last ones to leave, having stayed until the last rounds of cleaning camp because they had nowhere better to be. Clarke had been prolonging driving back down to New York for as long as possible, and Bellamy had simply failed to come up with an excuse to leave earlier. It wasn’t until every space on camp had been cleaned twice that the director had let them leave, so it was around two in the afternoon.

The day had been cloudy, the air dense with oncoming rain. They had been walking alone, just the two of them, down the gravel road, and Clarke hadn’t known what to say.

This was always the hardest part of every summer. Saying goodbye to Bellamy. And at the time she hadn't even known that she wouldn’t see him again for six years.

They’d reached their cars, hugged for a little bit too long for just friends. They’d been building toward something all summer, at least, since mid-July when Bellamy had broken up with his girlfriend from home, Gina, via phone call. But now it was too late, this thing too heavy between them. Clarke remembered feeling okay about it; she had thought that they would always have the next summer, and the summer after that one.

They’d pulled apart, and Bellamy had kissed her on the cheek.

“I’ll visit you,” he said, though she knew it was an empty promise because she was going to college in Oregon and he was staying on the east coast because he had in-state tuition and a scholarship at UConn.

“Or I’ll visit you,” she said, though she never did.

Then they’d gotten into their cars, which were parked next to one another, and started the engines. Without thinking, Clarke rolled down her window.

“Bellamy—” she called, and he rolled his down too. Not knowing what she had been planning to say, she fumbled. “I’ll miss you,” she ended up with, because it was true but not the whole truth. _I love you_. She should have just said it.

He had smiled. “I’ll miss you, too, princess.”

*

The trail got trickier as they gained height. Once they were nearly clear of the treeline, the ground became less solid and boggier. The AT had installed things to make trail safer and easier, such as railings on some of the rocks that would be unsafe to climb without them, and on the boggy parts of the mountain, there were wooden walkways. The problem was, the wooden walkways were not very well-maintained, and many of them regularly sank under the mud after it rained. This meant that once you got to the muddy part of the trail, you had to feel under the mud with your boot for the wooden walkway before putting weight on it because if you missed, your leg ended up submerged in mud up above the knee.

This happened to Bellamy within minutes. Clarke heard a loud, “Fuck!” behind her and immediately knew what had happened.

She burst into laughter.

“Shut up, Clarke!” Bellamy yelled, but he was half-smiling too.

“I’m coming!” Clarke assured him through her giggles, feeling her way down the walkway she was currently standing on and towards the end of it, where his leg was submerged up to right above his knee in the mud between two planks.

“Okay, take my arm,” she said once she was in front of him, giving him her good arm. He did, and she did her best to brace herself on a nearby tree branch, her wrist burning as she wrapped her hand around it to anchor herself.

“Fuck, Clarke, you shouldn’t—”

“Shut up. The plank starts here,” she said, showing him with her foot. He placed the foot that was still above the mud on top of it, ready to pull himself up with her help.

“Okay, on my count,” she said, and he met her eyes, nodding. “Okay. One, two, three!”

She pulled him up while he stepped up onto his other foot, and he was out, standing with both feet on the plank with Clarke. She felt herself tip backward with the momentum, and Bellamy instinctively reached out to steady her with an arm around her waist.

Her breath caught in her throat. This was the closest they had been since getting Clarke out of the notch, and they stood frozen, breathing in each other’s air, her feeling as if she was just now realizing that he was Bellamy. _Her_ Bellamy, not just some stranger that looked like him. Her brain was just now making the leap from point A to B. This was _Bellamy_.

They both snapped out of it around the same time, springing apart as if the contact had burned them.

“Your pants!” Clarke said, looking down.

Bellamy shrugged. “There’s always a water source near the campsites. I’ll wash them off when we stop for the night.” Then, he said, “Your wrist?”

She fiddled with the brace. “It’s fine.”

“We could have waited for someone else to pass by and help.”

“Well, I didn’t want to do that, okay?”

Bellamy was still frowning, staring at her wrist.

She looked down at it, too. “I don’t want to always feel like the helpless one, Bellamy.”

“Hey.” He ducked to meet her eyes. “You’ve never been the helpless one.”

She sighed heavily. He was of course stubborn enough to never admit it if he felt the same, but she felt utterly helped by Bellamy while she was definitely no more than a pain in his side, an annoyance on his path.

“Let’s get going,” she said.

*

They summitted a mountain—something with “Goose” in the name—around noon. They took their packs off and had a lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while talking about the year they had done this part of the trail, when they’d been fourteen and Bellamy had hurt his knee.

“See, you’re not the helpless one,” Bellamy said when his injury came up.

Clarke had to stop herself from rolling her eyes, because of course he hadn’t let this go.

“Sure, Bellamy,” she said, even though she had never been talking about that Clarke. She had been talking about now, her current self. This Clarke needed help. She was unable to help herself or others.

She watched Bellamy look out over the land below them, the forests and lakes and roads and towns. He looked like he always did when they were at the top of a mountain. The tension on his face eased, the hard lines of his shoulders growing softer. He was at peace, breathing in the thin mountain air as if each moment could be his last.

She was _helpless_.

*

They reached the campsite around five, according to Clarke’s watch. She reached into the side pocket of her pack for her phone. She had tied her solar phone charger to her pack, so it was done charging for the day.(This was good because she couldn’t fall asleep without listening to the audiobook of _Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire_ she had downloaded.)

Usually, Clarke would have to set up her tent, but the shelter was empty for once, so she and Bellamy settled in there. The shelters were like mini log cabins with a roof and three walls. This campsite also had a water source nearby, a few spots to set up tents, and a privy. But Clarke hated the privy because of their smell, so she often broke the rules and went in the woods twenty feet from the campsite.

They began their nightly routine. First, they filled their water bottles in the stream and purified them. Then, Clarke offered to make dinner while Bellamy washed off his pants in the stream. She made an old camp favorite, pizzas with pita bread, tomato sauce, and cheese in a pan over her gas stove. She put some chickpeas on there, too, for protein. By the time they were done, Bellamy had returned, his wet pants and hiking boot in hand. He’d changed into sweatpants and in-camp sneakers.

“No way!” he said excitedly when he saw what she’d made.

“Yep,” she said. “Use the bread first, right?”

They sat with their feet dangling off the side of the shelter, eating happily.

“You know Cicero?” Bellamy said.

“Yeah,” she said. “I had to read some of his stuff for Latin.”

“Since when did you take Latin?”

“Since I needed four semesters of a language in college and I didn’t want to speak anything out loud.”

“Damn, we have more to talk about than I thought,” Bellamy said with a grin. “But I guess that means that you already know that his name meant ‘chickpea.’”

“What? No, we never learned that!”

“They called him that because of his nose.”

“What a legacy.” She thought of something that made her elbow him. “Thanks to you, if we were in Ancient Rome my… uh, what were they called? My name thing would be ‘princess’ and I’d have to go down in history as ‘princess’ until the end of time.”

Bellamy laughed. “Your _cognomen ex virtute_, yes. But at least it’s better than ‘chickpea.’”

“Yeah, I guess I’ll take it.”

He chewed for a second. “You told Monty that you dropped out.”

“Yeah, after about a year and a half. I realized that I was only there because my mom wanted me to become a doctor. After a while, I stopped caring about what she wanted for me.”

“She didn’t get better?” Bellamy asked hesitantly, like he already knew.

And in a way, he did. He had been there for her that summer on staff, just months after her father had died, and he had been one of the few people who knew how bad Abby had gotten.

Clarke shook her head.

“I’m sorry, Clarke,” he said.

“I just—I just wanted to focus on my art. I started making money online selling commissions, and it was the only thing that helped me get through everything, you know? Then I got my job at the tattoo parlor, and it felt good to have some financial independence. I didn’t have a lot of money, but it was enough so that my mom didn’t have complete control over me anymore. Eventually, I was more her caretaker than she was mine, anyway. I finally had to cut ties with her. I don’t even know where she is anymore.”

He didn’t say anything for a long while. “I can’t say that I never thought that was a possibility, but I’m sorry to know it.”

“You don’t have to be.”

“But I am. You shouldn’t have had to deal with that.”

“No one should have to deal with any of this,” Clarke said, placing her bowl beside her, having finished her pizza. “Echo shouldn’t have cheated on you.”

“Don’t compare—”

“It’s the same thing! There are people who are supposed to be our family, and then they leave. And that shouldn’t happen.” Her throat tightened. She hadn’t meant to think of Madi, but she had.

She rose, wiping her palms on her pants and reaching into her pack to grab her dish soap. “I’m gonna go wash my bowl. Want me to take yours?”

Bellamy swallowed, and she knew that he hadn’t been ready for that conversation to end. “No, I think I’ll make myself another one. I’ll clean up and bear bag the food. You should get ready for bed.”

They proceeded as such, and while Bellamy was bagging the food and washing his own dish, Clarke stayed in the shelter and changed into her in-camp clothes: a soft pair of leggings and a thermal long-sleeved shirt. She then laid out her pad and sleeping bag against the wall of the shelter. It had gotten dark enough outside that inside the shelter was nearly pitch black, so she did all of this by the light of her flashlight.

Bellamy returned and set up his own sleeping pad and bag beside hers, just a foot or two away. She didn’t remark on it but was secretly happy that he hadn’t opted to make camp on the opposite side of the shelter after last night. She liked having him close.

Once they were both settled and both not tired yet, Bellamy pulled out a deck of cards. “Go Fish?”

So they played for way too long for two adults who should have been over Go Fish by this time in their lives. Clarke found herself loosening up, laughing, forgetting. Even though hiking had been good for her mental health—she wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t—every night so far on her journey had felt like a vigil, a time of mourning for all that she had lost. That was why she was so dependent on the paperback copy of _Little Women_ she had brought with her as well as the audiobook of _Goblet of Fire_. Having someone else’s words in her head had drowned out her own.

But now, Bellamy was doing that for her. He was lulling her into some semblance of peace, happiness even, and Clarke could only hope that she was doing the same for him.

“Clarke?” Bellamy whispered once they had turned off their flashlights and were about to sleep, having played Go Fish and eventually Old Maid until their eyes had started to droop.

“Yeah?” she whispered back.

“I’m glad I ran into you,” he admitted into the darkness.

Clarke smiled. “I’m glad you ran into me, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> remember to comment if you'd like!!
> 
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